MOVIE REVIEW: ' Locke' takes you on a riveting ride

Friday

May 9, 2014 at 8:00 AM

When's the last time you saw a film that featured just one actor in it?

By Ed SymkusFor The Patriot Ledger

When’s the last time you saw a film that featured just one actor in it? OK, you got me on that one. “Locke” has more than one actor in it. In fact, there are 12. But for the entirety of its 85-minute running time, we only get to actually see one of them. That would be the amazing Tom Hardy, most recently seen as the fearsome Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises,” on screen next year starring in the “Mad Max” reboot, and getting ready to star as Elton John in “Rocketman.”

Here, the British actor plays Ivan Locke, a man who has led an ordered life, always done the right thing, is a happy family man, is more skilled at his job than anyone. But that ordered life has been disrupted because he’s made a mistake – one that’s put him behind the wheel of his BMW on England’s M6 motorway, and sent him through the night on his way from wherever home is to London, where he’s going to meet with the woman who, many months earlier, he made that mistake with. A desperate phone call has come from her and ... well, you can figure out what this is all about.

We don’t get to hear that first call, but we do hear from her later; she’s one of those 12 actors that are only heard, never shown. Other characters include Ivan’s wife, his two sons, someone who works for him, his boss. They all exist in the film as voices on the other end of the phone, the calls made to or received from over the Bluetooth Ivan has plugged in.

A great plot element is that no one but Ivan and the woman he’s going to see knows what’s going on, at least in the early parts of the film. Therein lies its complications, drama, and swerves. You’d think that the one actor-many voices thing would come across as a gimmick, and it sort of does for the first 10 minutes or so. But because this is written and crafted so well, you soon forget about that. During my viewing, I came to realize at one point that I had subconsciously come up with perfect pictures of the other characters in my mind.

The entire film, except for a few opening moments, takes place in that car, with Ivan just driving and talking (actually most of those shots are of him sitting in the car that’s atop a moving flatbed truck, so it looks as if he’s really driving), and being shot from different angles. Writer-director Steven Knight’s trick was to install three cameras in the car, then just start filming the script, with those cameras trained on Ivan or on the phone that displays who is making which call. The voices belonged to actors who were tucked away together in a conference room, waiting to be cued by the director to make the calls to or take the calls from Ivan. They shot the whole film, as if it were a play, then did it all the way through again. The next day, the three cameras were installed in different parts of the car, and they did the same thing, till it had been shot twice a day for eight days – resulting in 16 different films, with different camera angles each day. Then it was edited together into one road trip.

Hardy gives a marvelously low-key performance (nicely matched by the desperation of the other characters) as a man who, through his own doings, has suddenly been gobsmacked by life, and can’t quite figure out how to deal with it. He’s a construction director who’s supposed to begin work on a new skyscraper in a matter of hours; instead he’s driving away from it. He’s supposed to be spending some quality time with his family; instead he’s driving away from them. He knows very little about the woman who, along with him, is at the center of all of this, and he’s driving toward her. His mantra, sometimes to people on the phone, sometimes to himself, includes phrases such as, “I have behaved in a way that’s not like me” and “Everything will be OK.” But his car phone keeps breaking things up by announcing, always while he’s in mid-call with someone else, “You have a call waiting.”

Knight gives the film a good, story-capping ending, one that leaves you thinking about Ivan and wondering what’s going to happen to him and everyone around him the next morning.